In February, representatives of Vlaams Belang, an anti-immigrant ultra-nationalist party from Belgium, traveled to the United States to meet with American white nationalist and anti-immigrant groups.

On February 22, Vlaams Belang leaders held a meeting with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the oldest and most influential anti-immigrant group in the country. The next evening they also spoke at a forum organized by the "Robert A. Taft Club" in the Arlington, Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C.  The Vlaams Belang is the latest incarnation of the Vlaams Blok, which maintained many links into the netherworld of National Socialism (See sidebar). The "Blok" was forced to disband in 2004 after a Belgian court declared it racist and outside the bounds of legal public discourse. {sidebar id=1}

The newer Vlaams Belang (VB), or Flemish Interest, toned down some of its worst rhetoric.  It has since won significant vote percentages in Flanders, where the dominant language is a Germanic tongue distinct from the Belgian Walloons who speak a French dialect.  And both men who came to the United States -- Filip Dewinter and Frank Vanhecke -- claim for themselves the mantle of elected office.  Dewinter is a member of the Belgian parliament and Vanhecke is a member of the European parliament.

Given the VB's reputation, FAIR's decision to meet with its representatives should tell us something about the American anti-immigrant lobby. Despite its origins in the den of white supremacist eugenics, FAIR executives have made a great deal of noise pretending that race, culture and the continued hegemony of white people are not on their agenda. FAIR gives money to candidates, supports and opposes legislation and other wise acts as if it is just one more D.C.-based political lobby.  But VB is explicitly about race and white dominance, and the meeting with FAIR is one more piece of evidence linking the American lobby to white nationalism.

The Virginia forum, on the other hand, openly gathered an amalgam of Buchananites, proponents of scientific racism, and white supremacists from the Council of Conservative Citizens.  The event was organized by 23-year-old Marcus Epstein, the executive director at both The American Cause Foundation, founded by Pat Buchanan, and the Team America PAC, where Pat's sister Angela (Bay) Buchanan serves as chair.

Among his many literary accomplishments, Epstein wrote his own eulogy of Sam Francis for the white nationalist website VDARE, declaring that, "like so many Southern leaders before him, Sam Francis ‘took his stand'."  Epstein seemed to do everything except whistle Dixie in his prose.  And so he had the pleasure of introducing the two Vlaams Belangers to a crowd of about thirty-five white nationalists.

Dewinter and Vanhecke spent their time assailing multiculturalism (calling it the "new communism"), bemoaning the falling birthrate among white Europeans, and declaring their intention to save "the West" from the depredations of immigrants who follow the Islamic faith. 

Islam is like a cuckoo bird that lays its eggs in your nest, one said. 

But the West is not yet dead, they argued in a reference to Pat Buchanan's book, The Death of the West.  At the end of the program, they gave Epstein a Flemish flag and a box of Belgian chocolates.

A favorable report on the event by the American Renaissance emphasized the importance of the so-called declining birthrate as a cause for worry in both the USA and Europe.  Biology is destiny for that crowd.  In the Internet discussion that followed the report, a number of posters proclaimed their intention to defend the West, although how they would "defend" it was left unmentioned.  Several noted the absence of an electoral party like the VB.  One such poster hoped that a party would form from a core group of break-away anti-immigrant "pro-white Republicans," who would happily annex the small far-right parties languishing on the edges of the political system.  Such a dream of the future has been repeated many times in these circles.  The absence of a genuine third-party has hounded those Americans who would like to imitate the VB, the British National Party and other such European formations. 

These fantasies tend to surface after trans-Atlantic soirees such as the one with the VB.  And the number and frequency of these events has multiplied in recent years.  There have been repeated visits by British National Party leaders with their counterparts in America, multiple contacts between the National Alliance in West Virginia and the NPD in Germany, and a meeting of Council of Conservative Citizens reps with the Front National in France.  In addition, the international traffic in Holocaust denial has never ceased.  In fact, the much-weakened post-Pierce National Alliance is planning to host a Holocaust denial conference at the end of May, bringing speakers from Britain, Canada and Germany to their compound in the mountains of West Virginia. 

All of these exchanges demonstrate a seemingly self-contradictory aspect of white nationalism: it is global in character and openly crosses borders like Coca Cola and Walt Disney.  It also quietly travels an underground trail like immigrants looking for work.

Simply put, nativism is not native anymore.  Xenophobia is not the fear of all foreigners, but only those with dark skins. And white nationalism is international in scope.

Watch the event 

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 Leonard Zeskind is the president of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights.